There is known a moving picture compression technique using inter-frame prediction. The inter-frame prediction is a compression method for coding a difference between frames.
When a moving picture is compressed by use of inter-frame prediction, a memory for storing image data to be referred to therein (which will be called “frame memory” below) is required. The image data has a large amount of information, and thus a moving picture compression apparatus needs to prepare a frame memory having a large storage capacity. However, the frame memory having a large storage capacity increases a circuit scale and manufacture cost of the moving picture compression apparatus.